Can You Start a Sentence with 'And'?

I always see some shocked faces when I tell a classroom of college students that there is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with the word “and” (or for that matter, the words “but,” “because,” or “however”).

I encourage them not to take my word for it, but to look it up, so I refer them to Ernest Gowers’ 1965 revision of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which explains that the idea is “a faintly lingering superstition.” I also often suggest Garner’s Modern American Usage, which calls it a “rank superstition.” Superstitions don’t age well, apparently.

Even Wilson Follett’s stuffy Modern American Usage calls the rule “a prejudice [that] lingers from the days of schoolmarmism rhetoric.” William Safire included it in his book of “misrules” of grammar, and Strunk and White didn’t mention it as a problem at all. So there.

Yet the superstition persists, and it remains a common belief among students entering college.

The “and” style, which linguists sometimes call paratactic, is common in early middle and early modern English, as a look at the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Canterbury Tales, or the King James Bible will show. So how did this bit of folklore come about?

The idea that one shouldn’t begin a sentence with “and” was not one of the prescriptive dicta proposed by eighteenth century Bishop Robert Lowth or by his imitator Lindley Murray, but it did show up in some nineteenth century language commentary. As Dennis Baron first noted, George Washington Moon singled “and” out in his 1868 book “The Bad English of Lindley Murray and Other Writers on the English Language.”

Moon wrote that “It is not scholarly to begin a sentence with the conjunction ‘and.’” (He was referring to George Perkins Marsh, the scholar, diplomat, and environmentalist who penned “Lectures on the English Language” in 1860.) Marsh’s comment is telling, because he refers to sentence-initial “and” as “not scholarly,” suggesting that avoiding “and” is a matter of style or rhetoric.

The misconception that it is an error of grammar is a generalization of the reasonable rhetorical advice not to overuse coordination. If writers rely only on "and," essays can become a mere sequential narrative: “It was summer and we went to the beach. And the sand on the beach was very hot. And after a while we got tired so we went home. And Mikey got sand in his bathing suit and the sand got all over the car.” You get the idea.

But what changed from the days of the King James Bible with its many sentence starting “...

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